Affirmative Action Bake Sales Sound Yummy and a Good Deal

December 16, 2003

This year, college campus affirmative action rebels are satirically but peacefully protesting affirmative action (AA) programs by using cookie and bake sales. The students are able clearly and effectively show that college student benefits are based on race and gender and are wrong.

For example, at Southern Methodist University, cookies were priced $1 for white males, 75 cents for white women, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.

These cookie prices demonstrated the disparity occurring on most if not all campuses in the US where whites loose and "people of color" and females win the affirmative action game. By equating university policies to the bake sale prices, they challenge unfair university affirmative action policies. They also show how those policies are sexist, racist and therefore nonsensical and indefensible.

Cookie sales as political parody and satire are not illegal but many college administrators feel it is not protected under the First Amendment. Rather than allow free speech and peaceful discourse, many administrators banned the sales based on public safety or even as discriminatory. They know that groups with the most invested in AA programs, minorities and women would react violently to the cookie sale parodies.

They were right!

Reactions were negative and sometimes physical. At the University of Washington there was shouting, taunts, heckling, and threats of physical harm ... all childish behavior supported the college administration.

Pitiful!

These colleges do not allow free speech and are afraid of political dissent: University of California-Irvine, Northwestern University, Southern Methodist University, William and Mary and the University of Washington. Certainly there are many more.

In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court supported affirmative action policies based on race but under limited conditions. (Grutter v. Bollinger, University of Michigan Law School)  In spite of their ruling, the unfairness of the affirmative action policies cannot be ignored nor can it silence the protests of many who believe those policies:

◊   Are a farce because universities and colleges give preferential treatment to minorities and women in violation of their own policies,
◊   Stigmatize minorities and women as being unworthy of entry to a college because different standards applied to them for admittance,
◊   Are insensitive to whites and discriminate against them and
◊   Have nothing to do with economic hardship or merit where the focus should be.